“Don't think, though, that these graves are not well kept at all times. Any day, at any hour, you can come here and you will find anywhere from ten to fifty women down on their knees smoothing the turf and freshening the flowers which they constantly keep upon the graves. But I knew that at daylight this morning all or nearly all of them would be here doing their work before the crowds began to arrive for the services, and I wanted you to see them at it, in the hope that you might write something about the sight for our people at home to read. If it helps them better to understand what is in the hearts of the French you and I may both count our time as having been well spent.”
He stood up looking across the cemetery, all bathed and burnished as it was in the soft rich sunshine.
“God,” he said under his breath, “how I am learning to love these people!”
So I have here set down the tale and to it I have to add a sequel. Decoration Day was months ago and now I learn that the custom which originated in this coast town is spreading through the country; that in many villages and towns where Americans are buried, French women whose sons or husbands or fathers or brothers have been killed, are taking over the care of the graves of the Americans, bestowing upon them the same loving offices which they would visit, if they could, upon the graves of their own men-folk.
It was one of those days which will live always in my memory—my feet wouldn't let me forget it even if my brain wanted to—when I had to walk to keep up. The available forces offered by Pershing to the French and British at the time of the great spring push of the Germans were moving up across Picardy. I, as one of the correspondents assigned each to a separate regiment, had set out at dawn to foot it for fifteen miles across country at the tail of the headquarters company. This happened to be a day, of which there were several, when neither a side-car, a riding-horse, or a seat in an ambulance or a baggage-wagon was available, and when the colonel's automobile was so crowded with the colonel and his driver and his adjutant and his French liaison officer and all their baggage, there was no room in it for me. That painful period of my martial adventures has elsewhere in these writings been described at greater or less length.
I was hoofing it over the flinty highway, trying to favour my blisters, when I heard a hail behind me. I turned around and there was an angel from Heaven, temporarily disguised as a Y. M. C. A. worker, sitting at the wheel of a big auto-truck with the sign of the red triangle on its sides.
“Could you use a little ride?” he inquired, grinning through the dust clouds as he drew up alongside and halted.
Could I use a little ride! For fear he might change his mind or something, I boarded him over a front wheel before I began expressing my eternal gratitude.
This ceremony being over, he told me who he was, and I told him who I was, and after that we became friends for life. He was a minister from a city in southern California but he didn't look it now, what with a four-days' growth of stubbly red whiskers on his weatherbeaten chops and grease spots on his service uniform. He had given up a good salary and he had left behind him a wife and three children—I am sure about the wife and I'm pretty sure there were three children, or two anyhow—to come over here and at the age of forty-four or thereabouts to run a perambulating canteen for the boys. There are a lot more like him in France, serving with the “Y” or the K. of C.'s or the Salvation Army or the Red Cross and as a rule they assay about nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine pounds of true gold to the ton.